Google must provide more information about how it uses the data it collects
about people or face legal action, privacy watchdogs have warned.

The Information Commissioner said the company’s privacy policy was potentially in breach of the Data Protection Act and gave it until September 20 to make changes.

It follows a radical overhaul of Google small print last year, when it combined data from web searches, Gmail, YouTube and dozens of other services to create a single profile of every users’ interests. Experts said it would allow the company to target advertising more effectively.

It sparked a row with European privacy regulators, whose joint calls for Google to halt the changes were ignored. The Information Commissioner’s ultimatum follows similar action from French and Spanish regulators.

“We believe that the updated policy does not provide sufficient information to enable UK users of Google’s services to understand how their data will be used across all of the company’s products,” a spokesman for the Information Commissioner said on Wednesday.

“Google must now amend their privacy policy to make it more informative for individual service users.”